The world is a better place since its [the Police Club’s] demise. You and I still do not understand young recruits and police academy students from Inala and Chelmer, male and female, earning ‘pocket money’, you read drugs, by prostituting themselves to Members and Visitors of that Club. A sordid situation which has ruined the lives of many.
I was sceptical. If what the source was alluding to held any truth, then wouldn’t I have heard of it before now? How could something like that be kept secret? Given I had nothing to lose, I asked the source a short but direct question: Did The Society of Friends exist? Had he heard of it?
‘100% true, the SOF still exists,’ the source texted back, clarifying that the organisation was really known as ‘The Society of Good Friends’. He offered particular details about the alleged organisation and the functions they held.
Used to meet at the Lobby Bar, Lennons, and a similar bar under the Hilton and from Elizabeth Street entrance. Drinks were free of charge to guests many of whom were 15 or 16 years old. Police ID was required to enter or in the company of a Police ID Member.
The SOGF is an example of young men, when intoxicated, were then taken to a hotel room, plied with Rohypnol or the like and horribly raped and videoed/photographed to keep them quiet.
The source would later tell me the society met about once a month. Formal invitations were sent out on gilt-edged cards. On average between 100 and 200 people attended. He added:
I meant to tell you a lot of functions were held at the Gateway Inn [on the corner of Ann Street and North Quay, now a Mercure apartments building] … very close government connections … that was where Juries and Bailiffs were locked up overnight. [Lucky] Door Prizes, aka teen males, for the monthly meeting … when the guys … some less than puberty … got to spend the weekend with the winner in the Honeymoon Suite with all drinks and food and parking free of charge.
I asked the source about Clarence Howard-Osborne.
‘I heard of Osborne on Police radio and talk at the Police Club,’ he wrote. He went on to tell me that as a young man visiting Brisbane from regional Queensland he had once been at a party in the home of Frederick William Whitehouse of Austral Street, St Lucia, not long before Whitehouse’s death.
But could the source be trusted? Without further corroborating details it was hard to believe that a ‘society’ of this magnitude could be operating covertly in the clubs and bars of Brisbane.
Frankly, given all the secrecy and deception, I had reached that point where I found it difficult to ascertain what was true or false. I slipped the copy of the Christmas card into a red manila folder, tucked it inside my filing cabinet and closed the drawer.
Phantoms
Not long after the last book in the trilogy was finally published I had my one and only dream about Terence Murray Lewis. He was driving what seemed like an old Morris on a highway. He was wearing a tweed sports coat and a pork pie hat. In the dream I was both in the car with him when it collided with something, and separate from him, able to witness the crash.
Suddenly there appeared a sweeping, slow-moving wave of liquid clay. Lewis, inexplicably, turned into a black wolf and disappeared around the corner of a building. I followed him and when I saw him next he had become a black fox.
I returned to the car and recovered a sheaf of Lewis’s diaries with his familiar handwriting and dozens of words illuminated by a highlighter pen then I went to find him again. I knew in the dream that Lewis had somewhere particular he had to get to and after a short while I managed to catch a glimpse of that place. It was a stone house with a pitched roof. The house was surrounded by hedges. A woman was there at the house. A woman who had been waiting there for Lewis for a very long time.
Then Lewis appeared. He wasn’t a fox, or a wolf, nor was he an old man any longer, but middle-aged. He was wearing baggy trousers and a singlet. There were streaks of green light across the sky, and shadows on the earth.
I stopped and watched Lewis and the woman for some time. I believed, in the dream, that as a man he had finally become his genuine self in this place. That I was observing the true Terence Murray Lewis after so many years. After all the stories and denials, he’d found that place where he could be his honest self. There was yellow light on Lewis and the woman, and they were smiling together, and I could see their facial features with extreme clarity. Until, still standing there in front of the house, they grew dimmer and dimmer, to the point where they became shadows, blurred at the edges. There was truth still there, but I could no longer see it.
I wrote down the details of the dream as soon as I woke up, and in the days that followed I understood how this story had been and remains crowded with phantoms, all of them hovering on the horizon, shifting further away as I move towards them, resisting scrutiny, preventing me from seeing the truth of their features.
I realised I had been surrounded by these phantoms long before I was old enough to understand what they were. As a child, I had lived one street away from the corrupt former police commissioner Frank Bischof. My father had, as it turned out, gone to school with Ray ‘Ducky’ O’Connor, the fully-fledged gangster and standover man who would be famously shot dead in a nightclub in Sydney by that city’s Mr Big, Lenny McPherson.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s my grandparents would live a short walk from the home of young Detective Terry Lewis, his wife, Hazel, and their growing brood of children. I would go to high school in Brisbane with a boy whose family lived just a few doors down from the Lewises when they moved to the grandeur of Garfield Drive in Bardon.
I would also find, in Lewis’s Juvenile Aid Bureau diaries from the 1960s, the names of two of my distant relatives. Another relative would establish a relationship with a relative of Billy Phillips Senior, the late tattooist, criminal and informant to Glen Hallahan.
In 2004, when I returned to live in Brisbane after almost 20 years away, I would rent a house with a direct view of the Queenslander where Shirley Margaret Brifman, prostitute and brothel madam, would temporarily seek refuge after she blew the whistle on corrupt police on national television in 1971, dying of an alleged drug overdose less than nine months later.
In writing a story for the Courier-Mail’s Qweekend magazine, I would befriend a woman who was once married to Robin Corrie, the flamboyant stockbroker and lover of Brifman who would take his own life in the early 1970s.
In 2014, participating in a course at the University of Queensland, I would learn that one of my classmates was the granddaughter of one of the Roberts brothers, the men who were friends with the notorious Rat Pack in the late 1950s, and whose National Hotel would be at the epicentre of a royal commission in the early 1960s. It seemed that my own life intersected with the broader book narrative, with connections, however distant, overlapping and stretching across the city and over generations.
Recently, I was at the home of an old school friend having dinner with him and his mother, she in her mid-eighties. Talk turned to a prominent Queensland politician I had been researching. I was becoming increasingly convinced he had been a part of Clarence Howard-Osborne’s paedophilic activities in the 1960s. I never mentioned the context of my interest in this man, only his name.
At that, my friend’s mother lowered her knife and fork. ‘I knew him pretty well,’ she said. ‘But us girls never really liked him.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘The word was that he liked to fiddle with little boys.’
The phantoms.
I remembered my thoughts back in late 2009 when my good friend Doug Hall, former director of the Queensland Art Gallery, telephoned me and said he had been interviewing Lewis for an essay he was writing. Lewis, he told me, had indicated he was ready ‘to write his book’. Would I be interested in meeting him?
I knew that if I slipped into this narrative it would take me years to extricate myself. To date, it has now been almost seven.
The Co
mmission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct, dubbed the Fitzgerald Inquiry, extended from mid-1987 to mid-1989 – two years. As Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald said, his inquiry could have gone on for 100 years.
I still remain unsure how much truth I’ve pulled to shore.
Crooked business is two-faced. There is the outward patina, all shiny and seemingly honest. Then there is the hidden, subterranean side. And the bigger the secret, the deeper it is buried. My research was a constant attempt at scratching through the surface to reach the muck. But to what end?
Lewis had told his story of innocence so many times that it had, certainly to him, but also to a good many other friends and allies, calcified into some sort of accepted truth. As recently as a couple of months before the publication of the final volume of the trilogy, All Fall Down, in 2015, Lewis was at the centre of a Channel Seven television documentary in which he again stridently admitted no wrongdoing and appealed to the government of the day for a fresh appeal into his convictions, almost a quarter of a century after the fact. In his late eighties Lewis was still fighting to clear his name.
On the other hand, I was contacted by dozens and dozens of honest retired police officers who essentially said the same thing to me – they had never fully understood why certain things had happened to them and their careers until they read the trilogy in sequence. Courtesy of the narrative timeline, they were able to see a broader picture of what was going on around them for the first time, albeit decades later. They told me that in the job, the corruption was so well entrenched, so brilliantly organised, that it was possible to have a work partner for years and not know they were in fact on the take and part of The Joke. That was precisely the position former Licensing Branch officer and whistleblower Nigel Powell had found himself in. He was one of many.
This evidence I had stitched together was riddled with what I would come to describe as troublesome ‘knots’ – important moments in the narrative of the history that are still a little out of focus and continue to throw up more questions than answers.
These included the appointment of Frank Bischof as Police Commissioner in 1958 despite the fact the newly elected Country Party were aware from numerous sources that he was corrupt; the reason for the failure of the National Hotel inquiry in 1963-64; the brutal murder of National Hotel manager Jack Cooper in the spring of 1971, precisely when prostitute and brothel madam Shirley Brifman was in Brisbane being interrogated by police after she blew the whistle on corrupt cops; and the alleged suicide of Brifman just weeks before she was due to appear as chief witness against Tony Murphy in his trial for perjury stemming from the National Hotel inquiry, to name but a few.
Then there was the sacking of various Police Ministers with whom Lewis didn’t agree; the reason why Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen did nothing despite being told of corruption in his police force from as early as the 1970s; the reason why nothing was done to investigate Senior Constable Dave Moore despite officers as highly ranked as assistant commissioner knowing of his activities; and the truth behind the implosion of Bjelke-Petersen’s long-standing premiership after the Fitzgerald Inquiry was called. And then, of course, there was Clarence Howard-Osborne, the serial paedophile, who carried on abusing children for over two decades, untouched, and who only came to police attention by sheer chance.
What I learned researching the books was that monstrously complicated systems orchestrated by the likes of someone like Howard-Osborne cannot continue to operate so successfully, and for so long, without assistance and protection.
It was inconceivable that the former government stenographer could have fluked his way through decades of sexually abusing children without someone or something having his back. It was the same with Bischof’s tenure, and the corrupt system known as The Joke.
I also learned over the years, through interviewing so many people from all walks of life, that this corruption in all its various guises, went everywhere; it was a cancer that infected government, the judiciary, the police, and all points in between. It extended from the highest tier of our society to the lowest. It was vast and it was insidious.
Yet as I progressed with the project, and despite the slings and arrows, I drew the greatest satisfaction from trying to restore at least a small amount of dignity to the legions of men and women who, throughout the period of this saga, put their hand up and tried to do the right thing. These heroes not only included police officers, but a myriad of ordinary Queensland citizens, prostitutes, public servants and the like. The tales of their fate, lined up back to back, were rolled out with monotonous familiarity: The attempt to tell the truth; the estrangement; the frame-up; the threat to family members; the sacking or forced resignation; the retreat, often interstate, to start a new life. Some paid with their lives.
I recently gave a talk to a group of extremely bright and highly intelligent Brisbane high-school students. I asked who, among them, had ever heard of Terence Murray Lewis.
Not one raised their hand.
Time passes. Memories fade. And as I wrote some years ago about Queenslanders, we’re a little more hesitant than most to look in our rear-vision mirrors. Yet I will go to work tomorrow, and the next week, and the next month, and the telephone will ring, and it will be a farmer from outside Rockhampton, or a former pub owner from Mount Isa, or a retired lawyer from Brisbane, or a petty criminal from the Gold Coast, or an old man who was a child when he saw something extraordinary. And they’ll have a story they’ll want to contribute, a thread to add to this epic, seminal saga of ours, this tapestry without end.
Acknowledgements
I would like offer my sincere thanks to the many hundreds of Queenslanders who, as the Three Crooked Kings trilogy was being progressively published, contacted me and generously offered their stories, reflections and observations. Some of those narratives are published in this volume.
Thank you to Nigel Powell for years of support and assistance in helping bring the trilogy and this book together, for listening to my endless theories and conjectures and for offering your own, and for coming along for the ride. It would have been a far less enjoyable one without you.
My appreciation also to Lou Rowan, Deb Drummond, Janice Teunis, Fred Komlosy and his family, Mary Anne Brifman and her family, the late A.B. (Abe) Duncan, Kingsley Fancourt, Dorothy Edith Knight, Kerry Brinkley and the family of the late Vince Murphy, Donna Ward, Ross Allan, Lawrence and Andree Daws, Tom Gillard, Archie Butterfly and (Sir) Malcolm McMillan.
I owe a lot to a succession of my editors at News Queensland –
David Fagan, Michael Crutcher, Christopher Dore, Peter Gleeson, Lachlan Heyward, Kylie Lang and Sue McVay. And to all of my work colleagues, especially Alison Walsh, Phil Stafford, Anne-Maree Lyons, Frances Whiting, David Kelly, Russell Shakespeare, Susan Johnson, Michael McKenna, Trent Dalton, Hedley Thomas and Des Houghton. Thank you again to Chris Masters, Phil Dickie, and the late Tony Reeves.
I’m extremely grateful to staff at the National Archives of Australia for expediting the availability of important documents for the purposes of this book – thank you to Cheryl McNamara in the Brisbane office, Tonia Vincent in Canberra and Andrew Griffin in Melbourne. Thanks also to Simon Farley, manager of the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland.
A huge thank you once more to the indefatigable Jean Bowra who has transcribed interviews for me over these many years, often under extreme pressure. A special shout-out to Gavin Rebetzke for his valuable advice.
Love and thanks to Ron and Karen Condon, Marsha and Phil Pope and family, John Shakespeare and Anna-Lisa Backlund, Gillian Morris and Geof Hawke, Gary Morris and Jo Gaha, and Nick Morris and Clodagh Crowe and family.
At the University of Queensland Press, thank you to CEO Greg Bain, to my publisher Madonna Duffy for unwavering support, courage, enthusiasm, and your uncanny ability to calmly steady the ship precisely when needed. And to my wonderful editor Jacquelin
e Blanchard, who has been on the road with me now for three books, and applied her alchemy tirelessly and with the utmost skill and professionalism. You’re one of the best, Jacq. Thank you also to the remarkable Bettina Richter.
As ever, I owe everything to my beautiful wife Katie Kate, who has held the family together without complaint during what has been an exacting and prolonged experience. My love and gratitude to you, darling, and to our children – Finnigan, Bridie Rose and Olly G. (Oliver George).
Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the page numbers of the printed book and are reproduced here for reference only. Please use the search facility of your device to find the relevant entry.
Ahern, Mike 233
Ahern, Terry 19
Alkira 207–8
All Fall Down 226, 229, 254, 270
Allan, Norm 42
Armstrong, Bill 58
Armstrong, Bronia 57–63
Askin, Bob 42–3
Atkinson, Syd ‘Sippy’ 40, 145, 155, 188, 194, 235, 261
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) 74, 76
Bahnemann, Ada 25, 26
Bahnemann, Gunther 25
Bailey, Ray 236
Baker, George 65
Banks, Rebecca 18
Barclay, Paul 229
Bauer, Norm 76, 237
Beer, Ross 138, 139
Before I Sleep 232, 237
Bennett, Colin 78, 83–6, 88, 96
Billings, Sarah 18
Billington, Richard 137
Bischof, Frank ‘Big Fella’ 10, 23–31, 34, 45, 47–52, 68, 103, 104, 114, 123–4, 135, 173, 179, 223, 237, 268, 271, 272
character 26–7, 47–8, 51–2
National Hotel 73–4, 77–9, 83–9, 119
prostitution 5, 20, 36, 76–8
Little Fish Are Sweet Page 25
